Matti Friedman

During the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in the late 1980s and 1990s, the army gave its outposts botanical names, which led to an otherwise undistinguished hill’s being called “Pumpkin.” In military radio traffic, a dead soldier was an “oleander” and an injured soldier merely a “flower,” species undefined.
Pumpkinflowers, then, refers not to a bucolic late-summer farm field, but rather to the soldiers physically and sometimes mentally wounded by service in a hostile land, show more where their presence became increasingly indefensible. Matti Friedman tells the stories of these young men and their challenges feelingly and at close hand, as he was one of them.
Friedman is a journalist born in Canada, who lamented the lack of writing about that occupation and its impact on the young Israeli men who served there, most of them fresh out of high school. So he set about telling their story himself, believing today’s Middle East situation had some of its seeds in this unnamed and largely ignored security zone conflict.
Initially, as so often happens in military history, the generals were fighting the last war. They thought the enemy comprised somewhat ragtag Palestinian guerrillas, but before long, the occupiers faced local Shiites, who called themselves the Party of God, Hezbollah. This group was generously funded by Iran and Syria and able to call on a seemingly endless supply of would-be suicide bombers. Hezbollah also soon seized the lead in the propaganda war.
That the TV images were the real weapons, that the Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers had been turned into actors in an attack staged for the camera—these weren’t things anyone understood yet. . . . Within a few years elements of the security zone war would, in turn, appear elsewhere and become familiar . . . : Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed and chaotic state; small clashes in which the key actor is not the general but the lieutenant or private; the use of a democracy’s sensitivities, public opinion, and free press as weapons against it.
Hezbollah was not interested in a negotiated withdrawal of Israeli troops or achievement of some limited goal: “It is a vision and an approach, not only a military reaction,” one of its leaders has written. Subsequent actions continue to demonstrate this larger view, which suggests limits on a strictly military response.
Through discussion of the Four Mothers movement, which supported withdrawal from Lebanon, Friedman explores the political conflict between the leftists of the dwindling kibbutz movement who in the 1990s believed in compromise and thought peace was possible and the rightists who believed peace was a dangerous illusion and who currently dominate Israeli politics.
The last section of the book describes Friedman’s return to Lebanon (using his Canadian passport) and his rediscovery of the remains of the Pumpkin, a place as tangible to him today, in its continued importance, as it ever was when he served there.
Not a long book at 225 pages, it’s insightful and well written, condensing both human interest and political analysis into the story of a single lost outpost. Author Lucette Lagnado says Friedman’s prose “manages to be lyrical, graceful, and deeply evocative even when tackling the harshest subjects imaginable,” and I certainly found it so. show less

ספר שעומד מחוץ לזאנרים המקובלים. חצי רפורטז'ה עיתונאית, חצי זכרונות, חצי סיפור מלחמה, חצי מצבה לנופלים שנכתבה על ידי מישהו שהוא בפנים (ישראלי) אבל בחוץ (קנדי) . אני קראתי את הספר בעברית אבל הגרסה העברית לא מופיעה עדיין באתר. אני חייב לומר שהספר מרתק. קראתי אותו בישיבה אחת תוך show more שלוש שעות של שבת בנשימה עצורה. מצאתי בו גם מגרעות אבל הן מתגמדות לאור העניין והחוויה. כמי שהכל מוכר לו גם כחפ"ש וגם כמי שחקר את רצועת הביטחון העניין האישי שלי היה גדול. התיאור שלו של החיילים הוא כל כך שונה מהתיאורים שאנחנו רגילים להם שהוא מעורר געגועים לישראל שכנראה היתה וכבר לא תהיה. ספר פטריוטי מאוד שבאופן מוזר יכולתי גם להזדהות אתו. show less

Subtitle: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War

"Sometimes you took over one of the guard posts, checked your watch an hour later, and found that five minutes had passed."

Pumpkin is the code name for a forward Israeli base in southern Lebanon at which the author served during his time in the Israeli military after he left high school in the 1990's. It is his story, and also the story of the other young soldiers with whom he served. In Part I, we follow a series of events that happened at show more Pumpkin before Matti's time there, through the eyes of Avi, a young soldier serving there in 1994. Part 2 focuses on the Israeli mothers who helped bring about the unraveling of the military's strategy to occupy southern Lebanon. In Part 3, we follow Matti's experiences as a soldier at Pumpkin during the outpost's last days. And in Part 4, Matti, using his dual Canadian citizenship, returns to Lebanon many years later, including to the area around Pumpkin, to try to make sense of what happened.

This book is part history, part memoir. The Israeli army's strategy was to set up "security" zones in southern Lebanon to protect Israel. In reality, the security zones seemed to be killing more people than they were saving. A group of Israeli mothers believing they were sending their sons to die in Lebanon for no reason began a movement which led to the Four Mothers' Petition, ultimately leading to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.

Matti writes, "The army gave the outposts pretty names like Basil, Crocus, Cypress and Red Pepper. This reflects a floral preoccupation in our military which in naming things generally avoids names like Hellfire or Apache...." Other euphemisms the army used in its communications were words like "flower," meaning wounded, or "oleander," meaning dead. Hence the book's title, Pumpkinflowers. show less

Powerful account of youthful Israelis maturing, fighting, and dying at a forgotten Lebanon outpost. In this limber, deceptively sparse take on the Middle East's tightening spiral of violence, Friedman combines military history and personal experience on and off the line in deft, observant prose. The narrative is reminiscent of novels by Denis Johnson and Robert Stone, linking combat's violent absurdity to the traumatized perspectives of individual participants. A haunting yet wry tale of show more young people at war, cursed by political forces beyond their control, that can stand alongside the best narrative nonfiction coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Remarkably educational and heartfelt: Friedman’s experiences provide a critical historical perspective on the changing climate of war in the Middle East, shifting from short official conflicts into longer unwinnable wars full of guerilla tactics and the deliberate creation of media narratives and images. His lyrical writing, attention to detail, and personal honesty draw the reader into empathy along with understanding. Friedman’s memoir deserves wide readership. This superb book is partly a history of the war, partly a personal memoir, and partly a work of political analysis. But mainly it is an effort to tell the story of the young men who fought to defend something “the size of a basketball court”—not all of whom survived. Pumpkinflowers is rich enough to allow different readers to draw their own political conclusions, if they choose to draw them at all. Above all, it is a book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last. In Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story Mr. Friedman has written a top-notch account of this under-analyzed war, persuasively arguing that it heralded a new style of combat in the Middle East, though no one knew it at the time show less